Personalized medicine using a patient's DNA to treat cancer leads to better results, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine in findings published today in the Journal Of the American Medical Association Oncology.
In a meta-analysis of hundreds of clinical trials involving thousands of patients, researchers report that therapeutic approaches using precision medicine, which emphasizes the use of individual genetics to refine cancer treatment, showed improved response and longer periods of disease remission, even in phase I trials.
After reviewing 346 phase I clinical trials involving 13,203 patients, the authors found that in precision medicine treatment arms, more than 30 percent of patients responded to treatment compared to 4.9 percent of patients enrolled in non-personalized arms.
Patients treated with precision medicine also benefited from longer progression-free survival with a median of 5.7 months before their disease worsened compared to 2.95 months for the others.
"Our analysis shows that in the era of precision medicine, phase I clinical trials using personalized therapy with a biomarker-based approach can do more than assessing the toxicity and side effects,'' said Maria Schwaederl, PharmD, lead author and UCSD Moores Cancer Center researcher at the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy.
"These early trials can result in improved outcomes for patients, even among people whose disease is resistant to standard treatments, by selecting patients who will respond best using a personalized approach from the start,'' Schwaederl said.
The study involved 58 precision medicine treatment arms and 293 non- personalized arms. Personalized arms led to improved outcomes across tumor types. The use of a personalized approach was associated with higher response rate of 24.5 percent in patients with solid tumors compared to 4.5 percent in non-personalized strategies.
"What we observed is that phase I trials can serve both to inform us on the effectiveness of new therapies as well as identify patients likely to benefit most if a personalized approach is employed,'' said Dr. Razelle Kurzrock, director of the Center for Personalized Therapy and Clinical Trials Office at Moores Cancer Center and senior author of the paper.
"Another important point is that targeted drugs in and of themselves are often quite useless if not combined with a patient's individual tumor biomarkers to determine whether they are likely to benefit from a particular
therapy.''
The research was funded, in part, by the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Fund.
